To avoid a trade-off between efficiency and configurability
Epos uses the client-server model of operation. All interesting
processing happens at the server, so the name Epos really
refers to the background server process and not to the
clients. (In fact, some users who use Epos for production work
wrote their own specialized clients.)

When you start Epos, it goes through the initialization phase,
in which it interprets the server command line and accesses
the file system to read a number of configuration files
(in the order of hundreds in the distributed configuration);
most of this process consists of setting options and of
parsing transformation rules for the text-to-speech conversion for each
configured language. It is possible to configure Epos so that
after the initialization phase it doesn't use the file system at all; by
default the loading of a few types of information is delayed
up to the point when that information is first used.
Almost all of the configuration is provided through
text files which are parsed into an efficient internal form.

After the initialization phase is over, Epos becames an
OS service or daemon, listening on a TCP port for new TTSCP
connections; TTSCP is the only protocol Epos uses
for passing both control information and data.
There is no principial limit on the number of simultaneously
connected clients or served requests and the configuration
structures for all clients are fully independent.

The most common task for Epos is a text to speech conversion.
Every client can decide (requesting different TTSCP streams)
whether the resulting speech should be sent back through
a data connection or whether the server should pass it directly
to the operating system audio output interface.
Apart from debugging and logging output this is the
only exception from the rule that TTSCP is the only
output channel for Epos (and basically the only input
channel, too).

This is the minimum you have to know about Epos to
run it. The following sections are harder to read,
but they include all the details. The sections
on the rules and especially on the options describe
both the overall structure of Epos configuration
and the details about specific functionality.
The section on TTSCP is very stable (we do not attempt
to keep Epos backwards compatible in details, but
we do keep TTSCP backward compatible) and includes
everything you need to write your own TTSCP client.
The sections on administration (logging messages
and security issues) summarize relevant information
from previous sections. The section on development
is a starting point for contributing to the Epos project
and also includes some technical details concerning
portability.